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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27008632">Let Me Hold It Lightly</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/downjune/pseuds/downjune'>downjune</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blood, Canonical Character Death, Dream Sex, F/F, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 01:41:13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,358</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27008632</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/downjune/pseuds/downjune</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In her hidden moments, in her warded rooms, Harrow thought she might actually die of loneliness.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>112</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Trick or Treat Exchange 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Let Me Hold It Lightly</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/vass/gifts">vass</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Hello, and happy Trick or Treat! I'm so glad I got the opportunity to write in this fandom!! I wanted this to be longer, but I'm still processing my HtN feelings, so I hope this is suitably punchy, though short.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><i>/There had been another girl who’d grown up alongside Harrow<br/>
But she had died before Harrow was born./</i> ~Harrow the Ninth</p><p>*</p><p>You dreamed of an embrace so tender it made you silent and stupid with incomprehension. Stiff and confused. That wore off, though. How could it not after everything you’d been through?</p><p>*</p><p>In her hidden moments, in her warded rooms, Harrow thought she might actually die of loneliness. The Saint of Duty’s spear might pry open her ribs, pierce her alveoli, or rupture her myocardium, but that was fleeting. This ache pulled her down and down, greater than gravity, until she could have been at the bottom of the River itself, crushed with the rest of the lonely souls too paralyzed with their own isolation to breathe.</p><p>She had longed for the Body to lie with her in these moments, even if the holiness of her devotion was sullied by the base, physical need for touch. But the Body had never come to her this way. The Body had never answered her like this. With warmth.</p><p>With solidity. </p><p>Harrow stretched her legs in her bed, and the balls of her feet brushed down the smooth length of a tibia wrapped in muscle and warm skin. The silk of leg hair tickled enough that she startled back, only she was followed—shin bone and the swell of calf muscle pressing between her own.</p><p>With her eyes closed, the soft light through her eyelids was warm and bright, almost like morning in Canaan House, the sheets against her skin soft like luxury. She exhaled as the weight in bed with her drew nearer, the slide of skin against sheet almost a touch all its own in the moment before her knees and shins, thighs and ankles, entwined with another’s. The names of the bones drifted through her mind in sequence at the points of contact, a comfort and a marvel.</p><p>Rough, warm fingers spread at her waist and widened to span her ribs, pushing her with firm intention onto her back. She went without a fight. She could think of no reason to fight. The light changed above her, blocked out by the blurred shape of solid muscle, and she reached blindly, craned upward and huffed a short sound as she was caught around the middle and held. As she was lifted and pressed, skin to skin. The absence of robes, of underclothes, dressed her in warmth as natural as the light streaming in through the window.</p><p>“I’ve got you, sweetheart.”</p><p>The voice, gruff and low, seeped down her ear canals and coated the ossicles in honey. All of her sharp edges smoothed down, and she lay back, trusting the weight above her to follow. Breath gusted damp and alive against her throat. One of those big hands slid from her side down to the back of her thigh, lifting her knee up so that a muscled thigh settled right at the center of her. </p><p>Harrow’s devotion to the Tomb was absolute. To allow another access to her body desecrated every one of the souls that had made her. </p><p>And yet. </p><p>Surely her body was meant to take this shape for another, in a room like this. For Harrow, who grasped and twirled thanergenic blooms around her knuckles, the press of this body along hers drew out a haze of thalergy like spores or dust motes in the sunshine. </p><p>She rocked her hips up, meeting the solid pressure of quadricep and beneath that, femur, the strongest bone in the body, and hers sang. It cried out in recognition. </p><p>“<i>Harrow.</i>”</p><p>That voice spoke directly to her bloodstream, pumping wildly through her carotid. </p><p>She gasped and clutched, grasped at deltoid and trapezius. She strained and reached for what she’d thought anathema to a product of genocide. She reached for it, and it reached back. Connection and creation and <i>pleasure</i>. It was right there for the sharing. For the making. “I know how to save you,” she said.</p><p>“That was supposed to be me, sweetcheeks.”</p><p>“Don’t argue with me about this,” she bit back, just as that big, rough hand squeezed her ass and drove down against her. </p><p>Harrow arched against the bed and drew her hand along the span of a torso, ribs padded beneath so much muscle as to be buried, so unlike her own. But Harrow wasn’t after bone. She briefly fit the neat curve of waist in the notch of first and second fingers, or tried to. Giving that up for futile, she slipped her hand between their bodies.</p><p>Glancing down, she could just make out the dusky definition of muscle and a patch of copper hair where thighs joined. They were only bodies, after all. She had to shift down the bed to reach.</p><p>“Whoa, Nonagesimus, right for the fingerbang? Isn’t that a little advanced for you?”</p><p>“<i>Disciplined and Punished Bums of the Second</i> every night before bed doesn’t count as experience,” Harrow said with a smirk, and slid her middle two digits into gorgeously <i>living</i> heat.</p><p>They both thrashed at the feel of it, the sensation looping back so completely that Harrow could not differentiate where it began or ended. The thalergenic bloom expanded with every surge of their bodies, and she knew with more confidence than a necromancer should ever have in this area that this was the key. </p><p>The weight above her grew heavier—more substantial. Harrow held on with the assurance that if she could just keep her grip, she could bring—she could keep—there was a way to carry—</p><p>Sheltered beneath that broad chest, she craned up and drew the dark rose of a nipple between her teeth, sucked hard, and got an electric jolt from it.</p><p>“Fuck me! Knew you were a biter. Not quite so hard, huh?”</p><p>She nuzzled in closer and didn’t apologize, though as she sucked and laved, she kept her teeth covered. She thrust her fingers between their bodies, sunk in deep to the metacarpo-phalangeal joint and understood that the only way out was through.</p><p>“Stay with me now,” she said. “One flesh—”</p><p>“—one end.”</p><p>The thalergenic bloom swept her up in a tide of ecstasy, her body alive with so much pleasure, she spasmed with it, great wrenching pulses. The weight above her moved with her, that voice sharp and beautiful in her ear, and Harrow reached for that achingly familiar face.</p><p>“Let me see you—please let me—” </p><p>“God, Harrow, for such a spooky bitch, you sure know how to—”</p><p>Harrow shut her up her with her mouth, a nip, then a bite, then what was probably kissing. Her eyes kept closing, no matter how hard she tried to keep them open. The moment she caught a glimpse of that blurry-close face, a heaviness in her skull dragged her down.</p><p>“Harrow, hey, you all right? Harrow?”</p><p>She dragged her fingers through thick, rust-colored hair and fought the sensation of drowning.</p><p>“You’re bleeding, sweetheart, and I know you do that a lot, but— Fuck, Harrow, it’s every— You’re hemorrhaging, how do I— Is this me? Am I hurting you? No, don’t go! Harrow—”</p><p>*</p><p>You woke up to a bed soaked in blood, but it was only yours—great tracks of it drying from your nose down to your ears, gummy in your overlong hair. You needed to cut it again. </p><p>With a groan, you rolled out and onto your feet, bobbled once until you had your balance, and shuffled to the bathroom. You didn’t look at your reflection as you scrubbed the crust from you Ninth-pale skin with running water and a cloth.</p><p>When that was done, you returned to the bedroom to get the rest of the way dressed, which only meant attaching the two-hander to your back. You didn’t sleep out of your clothes with the Saint of Duty out for blood.</p><p>It was too early for anyone else to be up, but you started your day, anyway. What else were you supposed to do?</p><p>You never remembered your dreams when your brain hemorrhaged out your ear holes.</p><p>And neither did I. Which is a shame, because I think that was a good one.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Come say hi on <a href="https://itstartledme.tumblr.com/">tumblr</a>!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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